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This article is mostly intended for those people still operating the old Nokia cell phones, such as Nokia Series 32 and some of the Series 60. It is now obvious that most modern cell phones have dropped support for monotonic Ring-Tones, in favor of the more advanced Multi-Channel poly-tonic ring-tones which adhere to the standard MIDI (musical instrument digital interface). Though not very intriguing, mastering Nokia composer can mean developing a basic understanding of musical scores, and most importantly, stimulating intrinsic human creativity while still retaining simplicity of expression.

Requirements: Nokia series 32/60 equipped with the relevant composer application.

Note: If the application is missing it needs to be installed to proceed.Please read your cell phone's user's guide to properly install the application!

Steps

1

Access the composer application on the cell phone.This step varies depending on the cell phone model in use. For series 32:

Select menu on the left.

Select extra from the list of icons that appears.

Select composer from the list of icons that appears.

2

Select an empty ringtone to fill in from the list of available empty ring tones.The maximum memory for a ringtone is up to 50 tones including the musical spaces.

3

Use the cell phone's numeric keypad to enter the tones that will make up your melody:

Press 1 if you want to enter Do.

Press 2 if you want to enter Re.

Press 3 if you want to enter Mi.

Press 4 if you want to enter Fa.

Press 5 if you want to enter Sol.

Press 6 if you want to enter La.

Press 7 if you want to enter Si.

Press 0 to enter a musical space.

4

If you want to change the octave for a particular tone (composer actually supports up to 3 octaves):

Put the cursor immediately after the tone whose octave you want to change.

Press the asterisk * key once, to change the octave for the current tone.

5

If you want to make the current tone sharp (applicable for Do, Re, Fa, Sol, La only):

Select the tone.

Press the bottom-right sharp key.

6

If you want to change the duration of a particular tone or musical space:

Select the tone or musical space.

Press 8 once, to decrease the duration, or press 9 once to increase the duration.

Community Q&A

Tips

A little background on music theory would be preferable, though not necessary.

The default duration of any musical space inserted between two consecutive tones is equal to the duration of the first tone.

Pressing the asterisk * or sharp # key on any of the musical spaces, has no effect. This is in concordance with the logic.

The behavior of key 9 is the opposite to that of key 8.

Composing ring tones with Nokia composer requires some sort of patience and the willingness to explore.

The default duration of a single tone inserted between two consecutive tones is equal to the duration of the first tone.

The behavior of the asterisk key in the composer is as follows:

If the octave for a particular tone is less than 3, pressing the asterisk, * key, will shift that tone one octave up in the musical scale.

If the octave for a particular tone is already 3, pressing the * key will reset the octave for that tone to 1.

The default octave for a single tone inserted between two consecutive tones is the same as that of the first tone.

The behavior of key 8 under the composer is as follows:

If the duration for a particular tone is greater than 1/32, pressing 8 once, will decrease the duration.

If the duration is 1/32, pressing 8 will reset the duration to 1.

The duration of a tone or musical space can take 6 distinct values which are the usual 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32. The fractions are with reference to the duration of a full tone, e.g. 1/2 is half the duration of a full tone.

References

This work is based on previous experience of the original author with Nokia Composer and Nokia PC Composer software. The latter is available separately and can be downloaded for free from the Nokia website.

Additional thanks to the creator of [1], a website with several handy utilities for the online conversion of RTTL format ring tones into MIDI files, which helped the Author to be more appreciating of musical scores in general.

Article Info

wikiHow is a “wiki,” similar to Wikipedia, which means that many of our articles are co-written by multiple authors. To create this article, volunteer authors worked to edit and improve it over time. This article has also been viewed 32,279 times.